Good News Report: Messiah Church, Detroit, MI

We’ve all heard the popular phrase used to encourage positivity in the midst of less-than-ideal circumstances.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Messiah Church in Detroit, MI is doing just that by finding creative ways to get Scripture into people’s hands, heads and hearts amidst a global pandemic.

A key focus area identified through Messiah’s participation in the Vitality Pathway was the need to have regular bible study in the life of the church. Naturally, they were introduced to Immerse, the Covenant Bible Reading Experience in partnership with Tyndale House Publishers and the newly-formed Institute for Bible Reading. This resource allows for a congregation to read through the entire Bible together in community twice a year for three years. As Michelle Sanchez comments: We [the Make and Deepen Disciples team] encourage every Covenant congregation to continue deep, daily engagement with the Word of God – the best discipleship tool there is.

When asked about their Immerse launch, Pastor Ara Koliantz shared: We dove in, ordered the books, and were getting ready with small groups. We have several people in our church who see reading as a challenge because of vision or literacy issues, and we didn’t want to exclude regular attenders and faithful members just because they can’t see or read. Though there are resource downloads through CovChurch.Org, many of the members do not have internet access. With libraries closed to the public and social distancing guidelines to follow, Messiah saw it as an issue of justice, and they wanted to proactively find a solution so that nobody would be excluded from daily exposure to the Word of God.

Pastor Ara reached out to Jody Eidnes and the Great Lakes Conference to see if she had any connections that would enable Messiah access to the audio recordings. The original thought was to invite several churches to pick volunteers to physically read aloud scripture passages that went along with the study. Recordings would then be burned onto CD and distributed, as needed. All glory to God — there was a handful of churches on board with the project in no time at all.

Even more exciting, after several conversations with Scott Bolinder from the Institute for Bible reading (which owns the rights to the Immerse Bible) and Tyndale House Publishers (which publishes the Immerse Bible), the Great Lakes Conference was given the right to download the audio files and for Messiah to use the files expressly on behalf of the people at Messiah who have difficulty with reading. This, of course, eliminated the need for volunteers spending hours upon hours of their time making recordings of themselves reading Scripture.

Messiah ended up purchasing small MP3 players, chargers, and headphones to loan out to Immerse participants in need of physical access to the audio recordings. Imagine, tiny little devices making ALL the difference so that people could join and continue being in community with one another.

We recognize that there are other inner-city churches who may be experiencing the same situation and know that there is a real need for getting recordings of Scripture into people’s hands. Messiah certainly found a way to make that lemonade out of a less-than-ideal situation, and we can only hope that the fruit of their labor will multiply the hope and heartbeat of Jesus.

I leave you with one more quote — a slight twist on the original: When life gets sour, sweeten it with gratitude.

It is with such gratitude that we thank Scott Bollinder and the Institute for Bible Reading for their work in allowing us to creatively solve this natural barrier that came up in one of our inner-city churches. We are deeply grateful for their care, concern, and effort to help us help others.